Tuesday, January 26, 2016

"Elizabeth Warren Sinks Clinton's Hopes for Endorsement: In a speech before the Senate Thursday, on the sixth anniversary of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, Elizabeth Warren made clear -- for those with ears to hear -- that she will not endorse Hillary Clinton." She said: "A new presidential election is upon us. The first votes will be cast in Iowa in just eleven days. Anyone who shrugs and claims that change is just too hard has crawled into bed with the billionaires who want to run this country like some private club."

Hilary expressed outrage over the poisoning of Flint's water, which is good, but it's not clear she is correct that it has been swept under the carpet merely because the victims are largely poor and black. David Dayen on Twitter: "#PorterRanch is a collection of gated communities sickened by a gas leak for close to 3 months. Nobody "came running" to fix it #DemDebate" He's not wrong, and he talked about that, and about the comparison between Sanders and Clinton on financial regulation, on last week's Virtually Speaking Sundays.

I do have problems with the amount of control the states have over Medicare/Medicaid. I also think Medicare is pretty weak tea compared to the NHS, and I'd like to see the medical industry brought to heel rather than simply promising to cover their outrageous costs. So I understand what Karoli is saying in, "Sanders Defends His Single Payer Health Care Proposal But Questions Linger." No, wait, I don't, because this piece still accepts the frame Clinton has put it in, including the idea that letting the states have any control is not the present situation under Obamacare. Clinton is not proposing to solve any of these problems, she's just pretending that she wants to. And I don't understand this idea that somehow Hillary Clinton's "pragmatic" approach is more possible. We need to elect a Congress that will pass an improved plan before we can do anything. I can't imagine the current Congress doing it and I don't see Clinton as the one who has the vision or the coat-tails to do it. In fact, the "centrist" Dems have been consistently sabotaging any attempt to get real liberal progressives into Congress. So, no, nothing floats until someone fixes the Democratic Party. And that means getting rid of the DLC, not re-electing it. Ezra is more honest over at Vox with "Hillary Clinton doesn't trust you [...] "Here, again, Clinton knows better. Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program - which she helped create - and Obamacare are already administered by the states and already rely on state funding. Sanders's plan would reduce the share of contributions states are responsible for and provide a federal fallback that doesn't currently exist if states refuse to participate in those programs. [...] All this, though, is Clinton's attempt to obscure the big picture: Sanders supports a single-payer health care system, and she doesn't. The technical arguments she's making about past legislation he's proposed could all be addressed if the bills moved forward. That's not the real disagreement between Clinton and Sanders. The real disagreement is he thinks we should move forward on single-payer, and she doesn't."
* "Hillary Clinton's absurd Bernie smear: Why attacking him from the right on healthcare makes literally no sense at all."
* Dean Baker, "Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders and Medicare for All"

"Human Rights Campaign Endorsement of Clinton Sparks Huge Controversy." Could it be because the current head of HRC once used to work for Bill Clinton's White House? It certainly can't be based on Clinton's superior record on the issue. And it wasn't based on a vote in the organization, because there wasn't one. Bernie Sanders answered Rachel Maddow's question about it by referring to the leadership of these organizations as "establishment" - which, of course, is true, because you can't hang around Washington lobbying Democratic bigwigs without becoming part of the political establishment. But that doesn't mean the membership of your organization is "the establishment". The establishment is a small collection of individuals, not the mass of underprivileged groups they purport to represent.

In a week when Ms. Palin made a word-salad speech endorsing Donald Trump that left many agape with its sheer incoherence, the dumbest entry still has to be this: "INDISPUTABLE: Bernie Is the Establishment, Hillary and Planned Parenthood are the Anti-Establishment", by Peter Daou. Now, I like Peter, even though I know he is a long-time Hillary partisan who has worked with her and thinks very highly of her, but this really takes the biscuit. "Bernie Sanders is a white male who has been in Congress for over a quarter century - his views notwithstanding, he is the definition of the establishment. Hillary Clinton is a woman attempting to break the ultimate gender barrier, the first female to become President of the United States - she is the definition of the anti-establishment." And, sorry, but when the head of an organization who spends a lot of time lobbying in Washington suddenly uses the prestige of their formerly non-partisan organization to endorse a political candidate they happen to have personal ties to, that's the establishment's network in action. When someone who used to work in the Clinton White House suddenly announces, without any consultation with the membership, that the gay rights organization they now head is endorsing Clinton, even though Sanders is demonstrably better on gay issues, that's the establishment network in action. Pretending that Bernie Sanders is more establishment than a multimillionaire former Senator and former Secretary of State who hob-nobs with the very people who have sucked the life out of our economy and still run it is like claiming that the miners who lost their livelihoods under Margaret Thatcher were more "establishment" than Thatcher was. It's just crazy. But I guess that's the kind of thing Blue Nation Review is suddenly posting now that it was bought out last month by a Hillary partisan. The radical change in its headlines from last month to this is downright scary.
* Also on David Brock's plate: "Correct the record doesn't want to be quoted when offering Anti-Sanders oppo research" - We all know David Brock is a Clinton partisan, but he doesn't want the public to know he does anti-Sanders oppo research and tries to slip it to the press without being named as a source.

Lee Fang asked Clinton if she'd release the transcripts of her Goldman Sachs speeches. She laughed.

The big guns are coming out:
* Ta-Nahesi Coates, "Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?" A better question might be, "Why doesn't anyone ask Hillary Clinton if she supports reparations?" Well, because they know the answer would be a nuanced version of, "No." Benjamin Dixon smells a rat, and Killer Mike is is on the same page. Chris Hayes talked to Coates, and I'm curious about why the Sanders campaign didn't respond to his queries. But it's clear that there's a difference between advocating policies that the current Congress won't pass (but another might) that have massive support from the public, on the one hand, and advocating policies that have limited support from the public that even a comparatively liberal Congress still wouldn't pass, on the other. Reparations isn't even a priority for the black community and is pretty unpopular with the public. This is not an issue you build mass solidarity on, especially at a time when half the white population feels that they, too, have had their resources ripped out from under them and they are practically slaves themselves. The latter concerns everyone, but reparations targets only a specific slice of the population. Bernie Sanders isn't actually campaigning for pie-in-the-sky, he's campaigning to do things we've already done before and can do again that the public has always supported, or things that have already succeeded in other countries that the American public massively supports. He's putting these issues on the table and reminding us that there is no earthly reason why we couldn't or shouldn't do them, and that we need to do them if we are going to go back to having the kind of country we all want. The kind of country in which, by the way, the black community's wealth grew enormously after the inception of the New Deal, and the rate of murder of blacks by the police dropped radically. That country was on a path to real equality for black people, but it was also on a path to making life reasonable for pretty much everyone.
* Paul Street, in "Race Without Class: the 'Bougie' Sensibility of Ta-Nehisi Coates," reminds us that Coates is essentially a neoliberal, however good a writer he may be, and he doesn't get the relationship of class to race nor the problems that hurt us all. "The 'satisfaction of thinking you are somebody because you are white' has always been a terrible lie. It has helped cloak white workers' subordinate and expendable status, which never disappeared despite the very real if limited advantages white skin privilege has conferred them relative to non-whites. It has injured those workers' material status by undermining their capacity to enhance their economic and political power by joining in solidarity with nonwhite workers. It has too often joined them in allegiance to rich fellow whites who couldn't care less about working class people of any color. It has focused white workers' ire on the wrong enemies - those with the least power (non-white workers and the poor) instead of the moneyed elite, which wields its wealth and power to cripple and destroy lives and the common good. And it has (along with numerous other the related reactionary messages in the reigning American ideology) encouraged white workers to blame themselves as well as even less privileged people of color for their own difficult circumstances under the remorseless reign of capital. 'Privileged' people are supposed to be doing well, after all. If they're not, it must be their own fault. Hence the rising death rates of working class white males, driven largely by alcoholism, drug abuse, and gun suicide. Hence also the popularity of 'The [white racist-sexist-nationalist] Donald' with millions of angry and marginalized white male 'Trumpenproletarians.'"

David Dayen: "What the Liberal Attacks on Bernie Sanders Are Really About: Self-styled liberal wonks and opinion writers decided to turn their guns on Bernie Sanders this week, deriding him as myopic, unrealistic and even wrong on the merits of his arguments on behalf of single-payer healthcare and systemic financial reform. But at least on financial reform, they weren't actually attacking Bernie. They were attacking Elizabeth Warren. It's Warren, not Sanders, who represents the leftward pole in the intra-Democratic debate over how deeply to reform the financial sector. Warren, not Sanders, manifests part of her vision in the bill she wrote - the 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, named for the two Depression-era lawmakers who initially separated commercial and investment banking. When Hillary Clinton and her supporters in the media dismiss Glass-Steagall as unnecessary and dangerous, they dismiss a consensus in most developed nations about the need to break interconnections in finance. The radicals in this debate, in other words, are those protecting the deregulatory status quo."

Cory Robin is getting irritated: "Bile, Bullshit, and Bernie: Sixteen notes on the presidential campaign: This is becoming a straight-up rerun of the 1948 campaign against Henry Wallace. Except that Clinton is running well to the right of Truman and even, in some respects, Dewey. It seems as if Clinton is campaigning for the vote of my Grandpa Nat. There's only one problem with this strategy: he's been dead for nearly a quarter-century. As was true of McCarthyism, it's not really Sanders's communism or his socialism that has got today's McCarthyites in the Democratic Party worried; it's actually his liberalism."

"The Head of the Democratic Party Is Either a Failure or a Liar: Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz said today that the Democrats' 2016 presidential debates were scheduled to reach the largest audience possible." She has to be an idiot. If she didn't know beforehand that Saturday nights opposite major sporting events during the busiest parts of the Christmas season were stupid times to schedule the debates, she certainly must have noticed everyone pointing it out as soon as we saw the schedule, so even if she was stupid enough to think those were good nights to schedule, why would she say such a thing in public after she managed to garner the lowest viewership conceivable?

"Meet Debbie Wasserman Schultz's First-Ever Primary Challenger: Tim Canova" - The DNC chair's new opponent is interviewed by Glenn Greenwald: "I am a lawyer by training. I studied at Georgetown University, and then was a Swedish Institute visiting scholar at the University of Stockholm. I practiced law in Manhattan for a large firm for a few years, and then went into teaching, and really my entire legal career was animated by the study of, you can say, making our institutions more democratically accountable. The thesis I wrote as a Swedish Institute visiting scholar was a comparison of Swedish and American labor law and corporate law, and comparing how in Sweden and in other European countries, labor had a seat at the table. Fifty percent of the board members were labor. And in the United States, labor doesn't have a seat at the table. They get run over. So that is the orientation - more democracy - that has animated me throughout my career. I served on Capitol Hill as a legislative aide to the late U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas in the early 1980s. A lot of this is on my campaign website, on the About Tim page - that I was an opponent of financial deregulation very early. I was writing in the early 1980s that the Garn-St. Germain Act, deregulation of depository interest rates and lending standards, would be a disaster, that it was a repeat of what had happened in the 1920s. It opened the door to predatory lending and sub-prime mortgages. I was calling that decades before that actually came to a crisis stage, you could say. In the 1990s, both as a lawyer and as a law professor, I was warning against getting rid of Glass-Steagall - Brooklyn Law Review article in the mid 1990s, 1995. I warned against financial derivatives. So I've been a constant critic of Wall Street deregulation. I'm for Main Street; I always have been. I believe in the New Deal. I believe in bottom-up economics."

Bill Black, "Wall Street Declares War on Bernie Sanders [...] Why do the Wall Street billionaires hate Bernie? Paul Krugman, unintentionally, provided the key in his most recent attack on Bernie. Krugman claimed that the key to what he claimed was President Obama's success was not 'breaking' 'Wall Street's power' over our economy and democracy. To Krugman and Hillary's horror, however, Democratic voters, like the median U.S. voter, understand that breaking the paramount power of the Wall Street billionaires over our economy and its political power that has caused us to descend into crony capitalism is essential to take back our Nation."

Obama gave his last State of the Union Address, and spent a little time making up stories about how wonderful TPP is, but we all know they're not true: "The Deeper, Uglier Side of TPP"

"Obama Administration Enables Billionaire Takeover of US Public Schools: With the Walton billionaires doubling down in their efforts to accelerate the charter school industry and with the Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, throwing in $100 million to privatize traditional public schools, one might think that the U.S. Department of Education would be a major line of defense for America's public schools educating the most underserved students or even a bold investor in sustainable community schools that are truly public. One would be wrong."

"U.S. Radically Changes Its Story of the Boats in Iranian Waters: to an Even More Suspicious Version [...] So, to recap the U.S. media narrative: when the U.S. Navy enters Iran's territorial waters without permission or notice, and Iran detains them and then releases them within 24 hours, Iran is the aggressor; and the same is true when Iran aggressively allows one of its civilian jets to be shot down by the U.S. Navy. And no matter how many times the U.S. government issues patently false statements about its military actions, those statements are entitled to unquestioning, uncritical treatment as Truth the next time a similar incident occurs."

Billy Bragg made this observation in his FaceBook post on the death of Alan Rickman: "It's not only the timing of his death and the fact that he too was 69 that links him to David Bowie. Both were working class kids from council estates who went to art school where they gained enough confidence in their own creativity that they were able to go on to find fame and fortune. Is it still possible for working class kids to realise their potential in such a way? The art schools are almost gone, those that survive now charge a fortune. The social mobility that Rickman and Bowie experienced is increasingly stifled."

"ATVOD Has Closed. Now What?" Its attacks on the British porn industry, and on the internet, won't stop. "Now that Ofcom has taken the reins, we can expect to see the regulator lobbying for more censorship powers against ‘unacceptable' overseas content - which doubtless will go far broader than pornography. Currently, a private members bill to enable censorship is in progress through Parliament. Like previous non-government attempts, this will probably fail, but we should watch out for the contents of the Queen's Speech this Spring. Any mention of ‘online safety' or ‘protecting children online' will herald the impending end of free Internet access for British citizens."

RIP
Tor Books Senior Editor, David G. Hartwell, 1941-2016. And, among other things, the wearer of outrageous clashing colors and hilarious ties who would always go along with a sartorial joke, and had a hand in nurturing some of the most important authors and editors and other publishing geniuses in science fiction. Memory is flooded with images of joking around with him, his smile, and serious conversations as well. At my first worldcon, he turned me on to Frangelico, so naturally I poured some in his honor when I first heard the news that he was alive but not expected to survive. He was special to many of us, and I could go on at length about what he meant to me, but Patrick also had a close professional association and wrote this. There are more like that all over the net, our family is in mourning. And Kathryn Cramer, his wife, wrote this. And George R.R. Martin says good-bye.
* Eagles guitarist Glenn Frey, 67, dies. I had enormous respect for their compositional and harmonic skills, always spot-on emotionally, and smarter than they might have seemed to some.
* "Dallas Taylor dies at 66; drummer for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young." Also of Clear Light and sessions work. Seems young until you think about how badly he treated himself. I mean, Keith Moon told him he did "too much drugs". Keith Moon!* Dale Griffin, drummer for Mott the Hoople, 67 - Their most noted tune was one David Bowie gave them, "All The Young Dudes".
* Giorgio Gomelsky, jazz club founder who gave The Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds their start, at 81 (although the Telegraph decided to headline him at 82, which wouldn't have happened until February).
* Robert Stigwood, music producer of almost everyone, 81: "In short, he was the man who put Cream together, launching Eric Clapton's career on the big stage; he discovered the Bee Gees and shepherded them through the highest points of their career; and he produced numerous iconic stage and film musicals, including Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, Grease and Saturday Night Fever."

What a real soldier had to say about the clown protest: "Refuge of Scoundrels [...] If the Founding Fathers had depended for their independence on the various irregular militias, they surely would have all been hanged - separately and together. Those men, those men who led the Continental Army and fought for our freedom, those men knew exactly what they were doing when they included the words 'well-regulated militia' in the Second Amendment. And they for damned sure weren't talking about giving Americans the right to shoot down their own government - because those Founders were the government."

"What the Vanilla ISIS Crisis in Oregon Says About the History of Wage Labor [...] The thing that is, again, never taught or said is that most English peasants wanted land and not a wage, which was too low to adequately sustain them. The wage system also deprived them of free time (the war on Christian holidays was not started by atheistic liberals but by the big bosses of farms and factories). Subsistence farming, foraging, and hunting provided rural peasants with more than they needed. Wage labor did not, and as a consequence, the state, which supported the interest of capitalists, had to impose laws that banned hunting (game laws) and made domestic production nearly impossible (enclosures). The English transition to capitalism did not need slave labor because wages for landless peasants were very low. But in the New World, the United States, the situation was different. There was lots of land to be had, and so wages were very high, and it was almost impossible to keep white workers in factories, fields, or other market-related enterprises. As soon as they made enough money, they left and bought land and become independent. And it is here that we find the roots of American individualism; it's not in entrepreneurship but in revolt: White American individuals were fleeing the market-centered system. They wanted out. And the best way out was land, which provided the things that the market provided but for much less work and demands on personal space and time."

The U.K. National Health Service Act of 1946: "The Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care act signed into law by President Obama in late March is a complicated bill that overhauls the nation's health care system over a period of five years. It sometimes is mentioned in the same breath with the United Kingdom's National Health Service Act of 1946 which set up that country's government-run health-care system. But that law was a paragon of succinctness, occupying only 92 pamphlet pages. Here (in three parts in Adobe Acrobat PDF format) is Britain's National Health Service Act of 1946"

You know, I had completely forgotten who played Scum of the Earth in the WKRP Episode "Hoodlum Rock".

"Victorian London in Incredible Detail: Here's a real treat. The National Library of Scotland's Map Department, supported by David Rumsey, have taken some very high-resolution scans of the Ordnance Survey 1893-6 1:1056 (that's 60 inches to the mile!) set of 500+ maps of London and, crucially, reorientated and stitched them together, so that they can be presented seamlessly (using OpenLayers) on top of a 'standard' Google web map or OpenStreetMap, with the base map acting as a modern context."

Ronan Murray, the organist at St. Joseph's in Glasthule, Dublin, performs "Life on Mars" on the church's organ.
* Clip of Chris Nickol's performance of "Life on Mars" on the 115-year-old organ in Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum,

Friday, January 15, 2016

I know we're all supposed to be fixed on the right-wing clown protest of a wildlife preserve, but everyone's already seen the story about how one of them took the money and drank it all up,* and the only other story I saw that truly entertained me was the one about the old man who took one of them down with his leg after the guy annoyed him.

Ian Welsh's 2015 in review: "The real dangers in the world are increasing. For the first world, this doesn't mean 'Islamic Terrorism,' which has never been an existential threat; it means political and economic instability at home. The people one should fear most are almost always one's own leaders, both political and economic, rather than foreigners, and this remains true."

David Dayen: "Hillary Clinton Whiffs on Reforming Wall Street's Ratings Agencies: Hillary Clinton's response to Bernie Sanders' plan to aggressively break up the big banks responsible for the financial crisis is to suggest that he is naive. 'My plan also goes beyond the biggest banks to include the whole financial sector,' Clinton wrote in a New York Times op-ed in December. 'My plan is more comprehensive,' she said at the first Democratic debate in October - and for that reason, 'frankly, it's tougher.' But Clinton's vision of financial reform neglects one part of the industry everyone agrees was an essential factor in the 2008 crisis: the credit ratings agencies, which assess the worthiness of Wall Street securities for investors. Sanders' plan, released last week, would no longer allow the companies that issue securities to pick which ratings agency they use - a simple but outrageous practice that creates an enormous conflict of interest and helps facilitate fraud. The heart of Clinton's pitch on Wall Street is that she recognizes all potential hazards. But there is not one word in her big reform plan about the ratings agencies."

David Dayen, "The Problem With Hillary Clinton Using a Progressive Hero to Attack Bernie Sanders" The problem is that it neuters Gensler, silences him, because as part of the Clinton campaign he can't object to things he used to object to that Clinton herself seems unconcerned with. "When asked for Gensler's views on Massad's tenure and whether a hypothetical Clinton administration would prioritize restoring stronger derivatives rules, the campaign declined to comment. Gensler's comments about Sanders repeatedly attacked him for failing to consider the shadow banking system: the collection of financial institutions whose activities sit outside the regulatory perimeter. But after two years of CFTC give-backs, much of the derivatives market sits in the shadows as well. On this point Gensler and Clinton have said little, and the silence speaks volumes."

"California Crisis Pregnancy Centers Dealt a Double Blow in Court: Two federal judges in California delivered a one-two punch to anti-choice activists at crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) last week by declining to block the state's new reproductive disclosure law. The law, set to go into effect January 1, requires a public notice about access to abortion and birth control at pregnancy-related clinics statewide. CPCs have sought to block the California Reproductive Freedom, Accountability, Comprehensive Care, and Transparency (FACT) Act, arguing in a flurry of lawsuits that it violates their constitutional rights to ?freedom of speech, assembly, and free exercise of religion."

"DuPont's deadly deceit: The decades-long cover-up behind the 'world's most slippery material' [...] None of this would have come to light had it not been for a West Virginia cattle rancher named Wilbur Tennant who, along with four other members of his family, sued DuPont in 1998 claiming he had lost hundreds of head of cattle because of pollution from a landfill next to his farm. DuPont had purchased the patch of land, which included a creek that ran directly into the Ohio River, from Tennant in the 1980s, telling him that it would be used as a non-hazardous landfill. But soon after the landfill got underway, the creek started to turn black and smelly. Sometimes there would be a layer of foam on the water. Within a few years, about 280 of Tennant's cattle, which drank water from the creek, had died. When the Tennants cut open a cow to investigate the cause of its death, they discovered that its internal organs had turned bright, neon green, video footage recorded by the rancher shows. Tennant and his family members, too, suffered breathing difficulties and cancers."

Kevin Drum: "My Right to Die: Assisted suicide, my family, and me" - Unfortunately, not just a long think piece. I was so sorry to read this. Whatever differences I have ever had with Kevin's approach over the years, I still think of him as One of Us, a friend, maybe even family. This was painful.

"I'm From Philly. 30 Years Later, I'm Still Trying To Make Sense Of The MOVE Bombing" - So am I, it was and is incomprehensible that this could happen in a major city, and no one in authority paid a price. "The police had come with warrants for several people they believed to be in the compound at 6221. No one knew how many weapons the MOVE folks had, or even how many people were in the compound - the police guessed that there were six adults and possibly as many as 12 children inside." And the cops blew the place up.

Women In Stem Collection - dresses for geek girls, but I'm not so sure, since I don't seem to see any pockets. I did like the periodic table dress, though. But a smock-style dress would be a lot better for crawling around setting cables and such.

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

"Dave Johnson and Marcy Wheeler wrote posts in December referring to Jimmy Carter's 'Malaise Speech' and its relationship to where the United States is today. Marcy and Dave describe some key inflection points we can expect to see in 2016, ranging from the impact of climate change policy to the Saudi/Iranian axis' impact on the Middle East and US policy. Also, the effect of the Transpacific Partnership (TPP) on American policy and politics, and the role of declining middle class wages on the Presidential election. Jay Ackroyd hosts," on Virtually Speaking Sundays.
The Washington Post fires it's only regular truly liberal columnist, Harold Meyerson "More than any other columnist for a major U.S. newspaper, Meyerson provided ongoing coverage and incisive analysis of the nation's labor movement and other progressive causes as well as the changing economy and the increasing aggressiveness of big business in American politics. He was one of the few columnists in the country who knew labor leaders and grassroots activists by name, and who could write sympathetically and knowledgeably about working people's experiences in their workplaces and communities. Since Steve Greenhouse retired last year as the New York Times' brilliant labor reporter, no other major paper has a reporter who covers unions and working people on a full-time basis. Now with Meyerson's firing, there's not one weekly columnist who understands the ins and outs of organized (and disorganized) labor."
* "Bernie Sanders calls Washington Post's column cancellation ‘unfortunate'" is the WaPo's own story.
* Politico: "Washington Post: Harold Meyerson column dropped because he failed to attract readers" - but. "In my discussion with him, Fred cited two reasons for not renewing my column. In addition to the click-count, he said there was too frequent an emphasis in my column on 'unions and Germany,' by which he meant -- my phrasing, not his -- worker rights and an alternative form of corporate governance."
* Digby: "The Washington Post just dissed the single largest faction in the Democratic Party"
* Meyerson's last WaPo column

Bernie Sanders told Face the Nation that he thought he could win over Trump's supporters because Trump says wages are too high but he - and everyone else - knows wages are too low. Interestingly, Trump did a sudden turnaround on the issue, later, saying now that wages are too low.

In case anyone was wondering where the DNC was going to find "independent investigators" of the data breach, they're probably not so independent.

In The American Prospect, "2016: The Year of the Billionaire: This presidential election could show how private capital and secrecy conspired to take the political process away from the American people."

"Tennessee students lose voter ID challenge."
* Kentucky governor Bevin issues executive orders rolling back voting rights and minimum wage, gives Kim Davis a win: Last month, former Kentucky governor Steve Beshear issued an executive order last month that extended voting rights to roughly 150,000 ex-felons who had completed their sentences. Yesterday, newly-elected Kentucky governor Matt Bevin reversed Beshear's executive order as one of a series of executive actions that amounted to a laundry list of conservative priorities. Bevin overturned Beshear's voting rights expansion despite having previously supported legislation to that effect. Kentucky has some of the most restrictive laws in the country when it comes to restoring voting rights for ex-felons, and Bevin has previously said that he thinks the state should move to allow for automatic rights restoration. So voting rights advocates were hopeful - even optimistic - that he would leave Beshear's order intact when he took office while the legislature worked to pass a law to its effect. Instead, Bevin went out of his way to take voting rights away from people he has already said should have them. You will recall there are still questions about the election that mysteriously put Bevin in office despite consistent polling prior to the election that showed him losing - so it's certainly not surprising that he'd pull something like this.

Krugman on Privilege, Pathology and Power: "Just to be clear, the biggest reason to oppose the power of money in politics is the way it lets the wealthy rig the system and distort policy priorities. And the biggest reason billionaires hate Mr. Obama is what he did to their taxes, not their feelings. The fact that some of those buying influence are also horrible people is secondary. But it's not trivial. Oligarchy, rule by the few, also tends to become rule by the monstrously self-centered. Narcisstocracy? Jerkigarchy? Anyway, it's an ugly spectacle, and it's probably going to get even uglier over the course of the year ahead."

Bill Black doesn't think much of Hillary's position on Glass-Steagall: "So this is the same thing that your mother taught you when you said that you did it because Johnny did it. And she says, and if Johnny jumped off, you know, a building, would you jump off a building? Well, Senator Clinton says yep, we've got to jump off the building again."

Sarah Robinson, whose blogging - about hate groups and about how we can communicate with people who identify as conservative - I have long admired, has rejoined the blogging community with her own site. She ended her introductory post with this: "Unitarian Rev. Forrest Church, son of Idaho Senator Frank Church, gives us our benediction: 'We must first let go of the things that will not save us. Then we must reach out for the things that can.' If this blog has a mission, it's to become a place where we embrace the task of figuring out what we need to let go of, and what might bring us to slightly less imperfect future."

I haven't had a chance to listen to this yet (and not entirely sure that I can), but BBC World Drama did a radio play called "The Great Charter" that might be interesting: "This innovative drama charts the fight for rights and freedoms in the 21st Century's supra-state - the Internet - to mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. It powerfully re-imagines the conflict which gave birth to the original Magna Carta in a fictional future to explore the current debate around digital rights." I think it will still be available to listen to up to the 21st.

Sir Terry Pratchett remembered by his daughter, Rhianna Pratchett: "We got a number of tear-inducing letters from fans who were nearing the end of their lives and took great comfort in imagining that the death that came for them would be riding a white horse called Binky. Dad had done something with more success than anyone else - he made Death friendly."

Of course, Christopher Lee has top billing among the voice actors in Soul Music. Terry Pratchett's Discworld Soul Music Part 1: "Soul Music is a seven-part animated television adaptation of the book of the same name by Terry Pratchett, produced by Cosgrove Hall, and first broadcast on 12 May 1997. It was the first film adaptation of an entire Discworld novel (following the Welcome to the Discworld short, which was based on a fragment of the novel Reaper Man)." Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7